Hoping for Pennsylvania high school football to expand to six classifications? You’ve still got a chance.

Wanting to maintain Pennsylvania’s status quo and just crown four football champions? You’re still in there as well.

So, when the PIAA’s Board of Directors gathered Wednesday morning in suburban Harrisburg to discuss agenda items, they basically agreed upon one thing when it came to football.

More discussion is needed before anything is agreed upon and implemented — even if that means staying the course.

Nonetheless, PIAA did not table everything during its lengthy morning meeting on a number of items that the Strategic Planning and Football Steering Committees decided during their Tuesday meeting to send their way.

Delco Times is pleased to announce that our new high school sports website PA Prep Live will be launching Tuesday, July 21, replacing our current sports website of GameTimePA.com while still building on the success that site has shown in the past two years.

As always, change will take some time to get used to, but we believe that this type of change will excite sports enthusiasts throughout the region by unlocking what you’ve always hoped for in a local sports website.

The first difference can be seen when first clicking on PA Prep Live. You will see a neatly packaged front page that will offer the top stories from all of District 1 — the Bicentennial League, Ches-Mont League, Central League, Delaware Valley League, PAC-10, Suburban One League, Athletic Association of Catholic Academies — Philadelphia Catholic League in District 12, as well as the Friends Schools League, Inter-Ac, Berks Conference, Mid-Atlantic Prep League, Tri-County League, Tri-State Christian Athletic Conference and ACCAC with video galleries and photo galleries populating the page.

Change is on the horizon for PIAA football and the Ches-Mont League is expected to benefit.

The PIAA Strategic Planning Committee will meet today to discuss expansion from four to six classifications, effective in time for the 2016 football season.

The decision to expand will be a historic one for the PIAA, an organization that is long overdue for further separation of his classes as Pennsylvania is the fifth-largest state in participating high school football programs. The PIAA has kept the four classification system since installing its state playoff format in 1988.

Eight proposals will be up for discussion at the meetings, which will be held today and Wednesday. Six of the eight proposals involve the expansion to six classes, while the other two keep the alignment at four classes. Half of the proposals involve a 10 percent clause, designed to take non-traditional students that are home-schooled or studying at technical/cyber-charter schools and add just 10 percent to its overall enrollment figure.

As we approached the 2015 season we are working with our current sponsors on renewals (invoices just went out) and are always interested in new sponsors. If you have a business that would like to sponsor our web page and/or our LIVE Internet game broadcasts please drop us a line at havenstatguys@aol.com. Our web page sponsor programs start at $100 and include a direct link to your company’s web page and our live game broadcasts cost as little as $25 per game. We can even produce your 30 second commercial for you at no additional charge!

Link your company to the fun and excitement of Strath Haven football. Drop us a note today!

Dobbins Tech has decided that two years of playing Haven’s opening football game was enough. Dobbins lost both games they played against the Panthers. In a mad scramble to find a team to play this late in the year, Athletic Director Chip Carroll and Head Coach Kevin Clancy, put out the word that they needed to find a team to play. Prep Charter, a AA school in Philadelphia (District 12), was one of the few schools that were available and they were kind enough to agree to play the game at George L. King Field. Prep Charter went 10-1-1 in 2014.

Coach Connor talks about the current state of high school football, Panther football and the PIAA.

Coach Jim Connor has been teaching and coaching for 37 years, most of those years in Nether Providence. He began at the old Swarthmore High School and was the head football coach there. He has made a decision to leave the Strath Haven coaching job as Defensive Coordinator (he will continue his teaching career at Strath Haven as well as coaching middle school sports) and has taken a position as the Defensive Coordinator at Cardinal O’Hara along with his son Mike. We interviewed him in his classroom at Strath Haven High School in mid-April to talk about his career, his future and his feelings about the current state of high school football in Pennsylvania.

CONNOR – I was head coach at Swarthmore high school and then I was the head coach here at Strath Haven when the school changed from Nether Providence to Strath Haven High School for the first five years. At the end of the five years I decided to try my hand at college coaching and went to Penn State and then kicked around at some colleges and coached at Widener and Swarthmore College. After that experience I decided I wanted to come back and be a high school coach. Being a college coach is just a tough lifestyle with moving your families all around and my kids were coming up so I wanted to be available to them as well.

It’s taken us many, many hours of work and effort since our site shut down in mid-January but we believe the effort has been worth it. What you see on these pages would not have been possible without the assistance of web designer, Paul Nuschke. He worked diligently (and patiently) to teach us the Word Press platform and we look forward to his continued assistance as we find bugs and problems.

While the format has changed the look and feel of the pages is very similar to our former site. We’ve produced a short video (above) as a brief tutorial on our new site and how to navigate around it and some of the new features we can offer in this format. Enjoy!

Archives

Game Broadcast – LIVE

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These Strath Haven Varsity football broadcasts, both live and archived, are the exclusive property of Havenfootball.net and are produced for the private use of our listening audience. No re-broadcast in full or in part is permitted without the expressed written permission of Havenfootball.net, Inc.